About

A collaborative approach to finding sustainable solutions for the creative community.

This project is an open dialogue facilitated by Fleet Collective to understand the city’s creative community, its micro ecologies and its complex fragility.

Fleet Collective a multi-disciplinary collective bringing together a community of artists, designers and other highly skilled people who combine entrepreneurial spirit with a shared commitment to sustainability and positive cultural impacts. Based in Dundee, the collective provides direct access to the cultural creativity, digital expertise and enterprising outlook for which the city is famous.

In the context of Fleet Collective and using it as a live participant the projects starting point will be to ask how it fits into the city’s creative system and what’s its value to it.

How does a Collective serve the creative community?
How does a Collective formulate its roll within the city’s new cultural vision?
Where can collectives fit, influence and feed into the city’s creative ecology?

This questioning approach will be applied to other creative providers, consumers and facilitators to open the debate about what’s working and what isn’t. We will be questioning the city’s cultural leadership and acting as city curator or connector.

Using Dundee’s creative produce and its creative discussions the project will consider ways in which a city can curate its creative narrative within its current creative landscape and how this effects future stability. The curatorial process would be used to encourage creative process and disseminate new knowledge about the cities creative journey. Considering the social, relational, the situational and even the political context, in much the same way as a curator would consider an exhibition, the project would find ways of bringing these elements into play and finding best practice models and frameworks.

Dundee’s is home to many different creative groups that have evolved naturally through common interests or created specifically with the goal of gaining and sharing knowledge. However these groups or communities of practice are often disjointed and under supported, resulting in them becoming disengaged or insular, duplication of resources or short lived. The project will go some way to understanding this trend and challenging its lack of leadership.

In a broader sense the project is interested in investigating and identifying the creative framework in which the city of Dundee operates and what makes its tick. It will find ways of curating the framework or curating within it in order to foster a more transparent, cohesive and sustainable citywide support system that allows development and facilitates change. It will use the curatorial process as a method of highlighting the city’s creative networks and webs in order to reaffirm its importance and warn of the consequences of neglect.